thoughts to thrive on

Life has been hard on me lately.  Scratch that.  I’ve been hard on me lately.  There’s a big difference. It seems the older I get, the more questions I have about life.  And it seems, the more questions I have, the less answers I’m able to find.  I turn 37 this month.  10 years ago I would have thought I’d have so much more figured out by now.  Instead, getting older only shows you how little you...

Perfect days are what we strive for.  Good days are what we hope for.  Bad days…well those are just bound to happen.  The thing about bad days is that we end up beating ourselves up and those around us because we let our emotions get the best of us.  The trick to navigating a bad day is recognition and acceptance.  If there is something that can be done to turn your day around and you know what...

Whether you’re feeling physically drained or you’re feeling the blues, the best thing you can do is nurture yourself.  For a moment, stop worrying about everyone and everything else and show yourself a little love.  Taking care of ourselves is often the last thing on our list or simply gets overlooked because there’s not enough time.  When I’m exhausted or feeling blue, I make myself a priority. ...

Our brains are so powerful that if we sit and dwell on something long enough, we believe that thing that we’re dwelling on is our reality.  When our actual reality may be far different. Last night Mark & I sat around a campfire, one of our favorite things to do.  Yet neither of us were enjoying it, it wasn’t providing us the peace that it usually does.  Both of our brains were consumed with...

I had a conversation with my dad recently that reminded me of an important principle in which I live by… Everything we do in life is a choice that we make.  I told him that since selling our house and beginning our life on the road, we hadn’t once wished we were back in that house.  And he said “I’ve never known you to have regrets” and I replied “that is a choice that I make, to live that...

Yesterday I hiked to the top of a mountain. A mountain that didn’t look that big from the ground. However, once I was 2,000’ above the desert floor, holding on to cables and very carefully finding footholds so that I didn’t slide down the face of the cliff to my death…the size of the mountain was no longer relevant. If I wasn’t careful, this mountain, like any mountain could end me. I am not a...

Every day Mark & I become a little more settled and familiar with living on the road.  While our location may change every few days, our days generally consist of the same thing.  Cooking, cleaning, working, paying bills, running errands, walking the dog, surfing the web.  Quite similar to any average day spent in a traditional house with one notable difference.  When your surroundings are...

Pain is a funny thing.  Yet, not funny at all.  When you feel it, it’s all encompassing.  It’s hard to see or feel or think about anything but the pain.  It feels like nothing else exists and nothing else ever will.  Whether physical pain or emotional pain, when pain takes hold, life becomes harder than ever to navigate.  Three months ago, when my husband and I decided to put our 13 year old dog...

Living on the road, not owning a house…or inhabiting a house at all for that matter, is a direct violation of society’s expectations.  This lifestyle goes directly against the grain of how most people live and has revealed to me the weight of what we’ve been led to believe is important.  We’ve been led to believe we should always ALWAYS be striving for more.  More money, more stuff.  Life is a...

Lately I’ve become increasingly attached to my phone.  Something that’s hard to admit because 1) I don’t want to believe that to be true 2) it’s such a slippery slope, it’s hard to step outside yourself and realize you’re doing it 3) it’s so easy to justify it as a tool that it’s difficult to admit to it being anything else. But it’s started to feel like an addiction lately.  The more I use it...